 [PJ] Austin has long been the weird, liberal capital of Texas. The rest of Texas just sort of shrugs and puts up with it. Austin is quirky. Austin is odd. Austin lives in its own little world. Austin is also home to some of the best live music joints anywhere and you have to work pretty hard to find a bad restaurant in the city, so it’s not without its charms. The joke about Austin is that it’s nice because it's so close to Texas (its the capital, a deep blue dot surrounded by a vast red sea). Austin is like that oddball cousin we all have. He’s there. He picks his nose and argues with light posts. But he’s nice and basically no threat to anyone, so whaddyagonnado?
Well, Texas’ weird cousin just became a threat to itself and others.
On June 20, the Austin city council passed what has to be one of the dumbest, most nonsensical ordinances since the city’s last idiotic, nonsensical ordinance (they pass a lot of ’em, bless their hearts).
The city council made it perfectly legal to camp out on the city’s public spaces and sidewalks, under bridges and overpasses and, well, everywhere all over town ‐ except, notably, parks and Austin City Hall.
That’s right. The city council exempted themselves from seeing homeless campouts ‐ let’s call them Adlervilles, after the esteemed Mayor Steve Adler ‐ on their own front porch. Mayor Adler and his cohort deemed city hall camping out of bounds. But you, owner of the local cookie store or overtaxed home, will get to see and step over and around all manner of things right out in your yard 24-7 now.
Oh, they’ll say they have a good reason for making camping legal and they’ll say they have a reason for making sure they will not have to step over people, their makeshift shelters ‐ and the garbage, feces, urine, used needles and other issues associated with legalized squatting that we have all already seen in Los Angeles and San Francisco. That reason, they claim, is the Occupy protests that made a tent- and filth-city on city hall back in 2012. The city doesn’t want to see that again.
Fine. But why inflict this on homeowners, business owners and everyone but themselves? I’m not making this up. They claim it’s mean to issue tickets for running a clothesline off the Discount Tire store ‐ which has actually already happened! That the tickets create a spiral out of which the homeless cannot escape. So it’s somehow better to issue tickets if you water your lawn at the wrong time, because Harry the Homeowner can actually pay the fine, but inhumane to keep the streets free of bedrolls and poop ‐ a policy which in Los Angeles is giving rise to medieval disease. Only in the liberal mind does this make any sense.
The real reason they exempted city hall is, obviously: because they can. The city votes so far to the left the city council is in little danger of a workable voter backlash. Che Guevara would be a moderate in this town. They will very likely get away with this. 
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